Photojournalism then, and now

gone · Apr 26, 2021

I ran into two Life photo articles online, one devoted to modern photojournalism from 2019, and another issue on photojournalism from roughly the 30's to early 70's.

Now

https://time.com/longform/best-photojournalism-2019/

and then

https://reyherphoto.com/time-life-photojournalists-iconic-photos/

The differences in feeling and aesthetics are powerful. In the earlier work you don't even need to read the captions, it's all there in the shot. The later work isn't like this, and I usually had to read the captions to know what the significance of the photo was about. People are still people, but something has definitely shifted (that's my 2 cents anyway).

Donald Qualls · Apr 26, 2021

Much of what you're seeing as the difference has to do with seeing the "then" photos over and over, along with other photos of the same famous people, for the past half century or more. Josef Stalin, Mahatma Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe -- the legends have grown. Greta Thunberg might be in the same class in fifty years -- but the photos our grandchildren will recognize her by will likely show an older face than the 16 year old in the first image of the "now" article linked.

Sirius Glass · Apr 26, 2021

Back then the world was black & white, now we have color.

Donald Qualls · Apr 26, 2021

Sirius Glass said:
Back then the world was black & white, now we have color.

There is considerable evidence that the world was in color at least as long ago as the 1890s.

MattKing · Apr 26, 2021

In order to make that comparison, I think you have to be able to look at both sets of photos with the exact same amount of knowledge (or more accurately, lack of knowledge) about the subjects.
Its tough trying to look at older work with younger, un-informed eyes.

Sirius Glass · Apr 26, 2021

Donald Qualls · Apr 27, 2021

Yep, he's got his dates all wrong, though I can't argue with his premise. There were parts of (Imperial) Russia that were in color well before 1900. Some areas of America, Scotland, and France had changed over by the 1920s (as shown by Lippman plates and Autochromes).

Which has precisely nothing to do with any putative difference in the quality of old vs. current photojournalism.

je55eah · Aug 5, 2023

Like the other respondants, I didn't think the photos were characteristically different. Most were people in places. A few of them featured some impressive engineering or architecture. Some of the better ones captured an emotion or an event in a way that made me want to know more. Unfortunately most of them are just portraits and the story is all in the text.

Don_ih · Aug 5, 2023

The Time article contains a much broader scope of photos than the other article. So from that the recent journalism seems to be farther reaching than the older stuff. But the Time article is from just one year while the older article was scraping the cream off decades. It's impossible to truly compare them.

You can go to Time magazine's website and browse through a year's worth of issues, though - filled with photos from a broad range of photographers. Pick a random year and take a look. Chances are, the best of those photos, from whatever year, won't be much better or worse than the 2019 photos.

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 5, 2023

A few thoughts. Photojournalism is timely usually. We see pictures that complement stories of today's news. As time passes, many of these pictures begin to have no meaning as the story fades from the public's minds. So pictures of famous people and famous events tend to be the ones that are remembered. When I look at the old photos in the article, there are many I don't know what they represented.

The other issue today is the way they're presented and consumed. Years ago, most people regularly read news magazines and daily newspapers where the photos were published. Today, we tend to get more videos something that we didn't see years ago when there was no TV or internet. You'd catch these news videos in the movie theaters when they had news-shorts-of-the-day. I think we're exposed to less stills than before.

The other thing is that because of cellphones, many of the news photos and videos are from amateurs rather than official photojournalists. That's a huge change.

jeffreyg · Aug 5, 2023

A little off some of the conversation but well worth a look if you can watch is a HBO documentary featuring photojournalists “ENDANGERED”. I personally know one of them and what you will see is for real and should be of concern to all of us.

je55eah · Aug 5, 2023

That documentary sounds interesting. I saw a movie about a photographer in apartheid south africa recently. I remembered thinking that apart from Patrick Lancaster there aren't any people doing that kind of journalism now.

Photojournalism then, and now

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